The Longest Goodbye. True Blood: “Gone, Gone, Gone”

Russell has seen the light, quite literally, and he wants more. Bill’s still on his Lilith trip, leading to a big loss for Eric. Maybe. Pam and Tara bond over some murder and Jason loses a friend, but gains... well, nothing. But at least there was nary a smoke monster in sight.

Lastly, the mystery behind the senior Stackhouses’ deaths deepens with some troubling implications for Sookie.

ERIC

Unlike poor geeky Mac (she will always be Mac from Veronica Mars to me), Salome thinks Eric is worth trying really hard to convert to the new vampire agenda. Nora is quite possibly the most boring character on the show in ages. I don’t think we’re supposed to care about her — she’s as good as a rebound for Eric post-Sookie — but it would be nice. All she does is cry and pray. I really hope she gets staked soon. When she forces Eric to drink Lilith’s blood, they both see their maker, Godric, who is subsequently killed by a particularly meaty neck gash via Lilith’s nails. Before he disappears he tells Nora he’s very disappointed in her, saying he evolved. Boy, everyone’s saying they’re evolved lately.

But what does Eric’s vision really mean? What’s dead may never die, right? Works for Game of Thrones. Eric was reacting like Godric was really gone, but if his master’s always a part of him, I don’t think Lilith can really take that away. It was odd though. I would ask how Lilith can be stopped, but she’s not doing much directly. It’s her followers who are the problem.

Speaking of...

RUSSELL

He’s outed himself as dreaming a little bigger than the rest. Salome may argue that vampires are creatures of the night, but Russell’s tasted fey blood and has plans to figure out a way to synthesize Sookie’s blood so he can be pretty much invincible. I can’t see this as a negative in any way.

HOYT

Remember when Hoyt was all sweet and kind? I really hate what the character’s become in the past year, so tonight’s episode seemed like a disproportionately long goodbye for such a whiny jerk. He basically got three send-off scenes. However, it was worth it to see Jessica glamour herself and Jason out of his mind and give him a fresh start. Heartwrenching. I still kind of hate Hoyt for using Jessica and asking her to do that though. Like he’s the only person to ever get cheated on. I feel for Jason’s situation — no girl, no buddies — but, really. Hoyt? Good riddance.

SAM and LUNA

The shifting pair is getting closer to stealing Emma back. Glad to see the little moppet isn’t permanently stuck as a wolf. How hilarious was it to see Rev. Steve still treating her like a dog, though? We didn’t get any time with the wolf pack tonight, including another disconnected scene featuring Alcide by himself. This was good. The show’s more streamlined as we careen towards the season finale.

PAM and TARA

“Ice your clam.” R.I.P., Sheriff Elijah. We hardly knew ye, but ye had some very funny lines. It seems my predictions were near to the truth; Pam needs Tara to fill the Eric-shaped hole in her life. And Tara needs Pam to show her how things are done. And they can both learn from each other. And Ginger can just continue to shriek. Will Fangtasia be shutting down for good so long as the Tru Blood shortage continues? Every establishment is a ghost town.

Speaking of...

LAFAYETTE and SHOTGUN

Nice. Lafayette doesn’t need a story. He just needs to show up and put dumbfuck rednecks in their place.

SOOKIE

Who turned Mike the coroner into a vampire? Did he go to Sookie’s on his own or did someone send him? Sookie is so lucky she got chopsticks with her Chinese food. That pretty much never happens to me, even if I ask. And the fact that they weren’t the cheapo kind that instantly splinters when you separate them? Must be those fairies looking out for her. But I’ve seen more realistic deaths by chopstick and it isn’t by going in through the back.

How rude of Mike to turn to goo in the living room. Doesn’t he know that’s what the Stackhouse kitchen is for?

After some tedious glyph decifering on an obviously non-human scroll, we learn that Sookie does indeed belong to someone as per the binding contract. DUN DUN DUNNNN. Now I’m really thinking Warlow is Russell. But I have very little proof to back it up.

What did you think of the first Terry-free episode of the season? Did you miss him or Alcide? Do you think Jessica will be the one to save Bill and Eric? She’s currently the most sensible person on this show. Sound off in the comments below.

Seems more like the establishment is getting unraveled; I wouldn't be surprised to see Tara/Pam get ignored. But then 3000 year old rampaging vampires probably tend to have that effect on stealing the spotlight.

I'm coming around to thinking M. Warlow may not be anyone from the current vamp cast, but a new half vamp/half faery to be introduced in the season ender. It's the only way to explain Sookie being able to see what happened to her parents through Warlow's eyes (the other faeries said that sort of vision is impossible for a faery) and the contract being drawn up in the 1700s and in an ancient fae language. And I think it will be Warlow taking Sookie in the season ender as well.

Loved LaLa, Pam and Jason again this week and their lines. I swear those three have the bestest lines.

Question for anyone who cares to respond - Is Anna Paquin (Sookie) preggers during some of these scenes? I swear that scene between her and Jason in G-Ma Adelle's bedroom, searching under the bed, she's wearing maturnity clothes. Plus she's clutching a pillow over her stomach - classic pregnancy camouflage filming.

As I've always liked Hoyt (despite his behavior of late), I'm glad they've allowed him to depart with the possibility of return at a later date.

Didn't Godric basically tell Nora and Eric it's not up to him to stop the nekkid and bloodied Lillith (someone get that woman some clothes), inferring it was up to the two of them? I still think if Lillith's blood is destroyed, the AVL God-wannabies will have nothing to empower them to take over the world. Destroy the blood already!

Loved Russell's accent changing from Cajun to German in the blink of an eye. We saw it last week as well when the wolf pack leader guy (can't for the life of me remember his name) tried to get Emma-the-dog back from Russell.

BTW, loved a smoke monster free episode, but I still like seeing Terry and Arlene in a show ... sporadically. Arlene often has great quips to add to a scene. And Alcide in the show adds great scenery. Always!

As for who will save the day, I think Bill and Jess and Eric will do the deed, but Bill will perish in the process. Simply my prediction.

Anna Paquin was and still is pregnant with twins. She confirmed it right as the season finale was being filmed. I didn't notice the cover-up. Gotta look more closely next week. Guess she won't be getting nekkid anytime soon.

I agree - destroy the blood at least!

ETA: Have Jessica and Eric ever shared a scene together? It'd be cool to see them team up and save Bill and destroy the others.

I still think Warlow's profile on the bridge looked like Russell, but it'd make sense if this is all set-up for some new twist in the finale. Why else would they waste screen-time taking that scroll to two translators? They're stretching the story out.

Russell told Eric fairies were a myth, back when Eric was telling him about Sookie and her blood allowing them to go out in daylight. Russell also thought Sookie Stackhouse was just Bill's girl before the whole drinking her blood deal. Russell doesn't exactly strike me as an absent minded professor who has forgotten 300 years ago he signed a contract with a fairy (John Stackhouse) in that fairy's blood stating the very first female fairy born to the Stackhouse family belongs to him. He also way too entitled to not have announced he owns Sookie based on a contract after meeting Sookie Stackhouse and realizing she is a fairy.

I don't think Warlow's real identity has been shown yet. I think this storyline is actually going to be the season's cliffhangers setting up next season and that we will not know who Warlow really is until next season.

I've always had trouble believing that an ordinary human, one who didn't have super-strength like Buffy, would have the arm-strength to drive even a sharpened stake through a vampire's heart, considering that they'd have to drive through the big muscles of the chest and maybe even the breastbone. I find it hard to believe that even BUFFY could drive a pair of takeout chopsticks through a vampire's heart. At the very least, they'd snap. And even if they stayed together, they're probably not sharp enough to penetrate the skin. And even if they were, I've never seen any indication that Sookie has the enormous arm strength that would be necessary to drive them through the heart, from the BACK yet. Totally unbelievable.

You do have to wonder why some vampire would go to all the trouble to turn the Coroner, who was certainly not sexy. Why not just drain him instead? Find it hard to believe that some vampire would turn him in order to send him after Sookie. Then he'd drink her himself, and they wouldn't get any of her blood. Certainly Russell would have come himself.

The humans have been pretty wimpy and hapless so far, especially as one of Roman's reasons for mainlining was fear that the humans would rise up and destroy all vampires. Don't they notice all these massacres taking place? Doesn't the government have some kind of SWAT teams that they could send in to take out the vampires? Wooden bullets seem to have become common enough, and the government has had several years to work out contingency plans for what to do if it came to war with the vampires. Odd that the humans who DID fight back ended up being the bad guys that we were rooting against (of course, the show stacked the deck that way by showing them as assholes who killed harmless shifters too; what if one of them had been at the frat house where Russell and Steve were carrying out their massacre, though? Would we have been on their side then?)

Yes, I think that they're already filming Sookie to disguise her pregnancy. Sad that JASON was considerably smarter than her throughout this episode.

Hoyt was a smarmy asshole to the end, putting all of his pain on Jason and Jessica rather than shouldering it himself and moving on. I won't miss him (although I suspect that he'll be back). Jessica and Jason did a very fine job of acting in that scene; Jason was first-rate throughout the episode, in fact. I hope they don't turn him, as it's rumored that they're going to.

I was still struggling to get my mind around the idea of the ghost of a vampire--now I have to struggle with the idea of the ghost of a vampire getting KILLED.

Since Bill was "praising Lillith"ing when nobody else was around, I guess his religious conversion was sincere and he's not playing a long game. Which is kind of disappointing.

I agree with Rae's reasoning in #7. I no longer think it's going to be Russell. BILL was the one who was investigating Sookie's family tree--but he wouldn't have been around 300 years ago. I suspect that Warlow is going to be a new character who shows up as the season-ending cliffhanger.

I felt that same way about the chopsticks as you did - WTF?! I pushed back the logistics of such a move by remembering this show is intended as campy, therefore reason and logic aren't supposed to apply.

And from the clip on YouTube for next week's preview (as the previews for next week's epi shown at end of the epi SUCK lately), it looks as though the government does send in some sort of SWAT team to eradicate or at the very least talk very stearnly to the vamps. We'll see.

I've been told that in the book series, Jason is turned and becomes a werepanther (sweet Jesus - don't bring back the werepanthers), so it's not too far a stretch for the show to turn him into a vamp instead. I hope the show doesn't go that route as I loathe the idea, loathe it hard!

I hate the idea of Jason being turned into a vampire too, if for no other reason--and there are several reasons--than that it makes his relationship with Jessica less complicated. It sure looks like they're going to do it, though. If you watch the coming attractions reel for the next episode, it shows Jason at the bottom of a grave with his eyes closed and Jessica's arms wrapped around him while she cries and tells him she's so sorry--so yeah, I think they're going to turn him.

I agree that it's marginally better to turn him into a vampire than into a werepanther, especially as, as I understand it, in the books he doesn't turn into a panther like Crystal did but into a two-footed humanoid form like the classic horror movie image of a werewolf. Better a vampire than that--but I'm not happy about it.

The show could just turn EVERYBODY into vampires, thus resolving a lot of the conflicts.

Yes, the coming attractions seem to show a human strike team of some sort going in to or preparing to go into the headquarters of The Authority (are there only five or six people IN The Authority, by the way? Seems that way. Are there no other branches in other countries or elsewhere in the U.S.?). It'll be interesting if they can handle this without making it seem too much like the Inititive arc of BUFFY. (I doubt it myself.)

I don't understand why the Authority can't just call in their own SWAT teams and shoot silver nets over Russell, as they've done before. Or just shoot him, for that matter.

Bill in the teaser staggering around shrieking that he's The Chosen One makes it seem like he's gone bugfuck crazy. Wonder what they're going to do with that? Is it possible that they'll kill him?

Maybe they will rub Bill out. Supposed to be a key character that gets whacked this season. (I swear if it turns out the "key" character is Hoyt scooting away care and memory free, I'm gonna punch someone in the head.) And, from what I've been told, Bill in the books is pretty much obsolete; it's all Sookie and Eric.

As for inability of other vamps to do away with Russell, he keeps saying he's 3,000 years old, older than them all. Maybe they can't take him down.

That didn't stop them from taking him down in the warehouse, or taking him down again later in the council room.

If they kill Jason and then turn him into a vampire, that'll enable them to say that a 'key character got whacked," and yet still not lose Jason from the show--just like they killed Tara, but she's still around.

If Ghost Godric hadn't stopped Eric from killing Russell two seasons ago (for no reason that ever made a lot of sense to me), they'd be having a lot less trouble now, and Ghost Godric would still be "alive," or whatever he was.

Hey -- is there no significance to the fact that Bill watched Eric's "conversion" via video screen and did not see Lilth? I thought it signified that he understood that Lilth was nothing more than a shared hallucination. It appears that the vampires have their own version of "V" with the same effects.

In general, I am no fan of this show. Why am I watching? Beats me--so I can talk to friends who adore it. The vampires are too much like unreformed southern racists and they can all burn, imho. The effect of having my old hometown, Shreveport, show up just makes the metaphor more striking.

I'd think the same thing about Bill not seeing Lilith on the video screen--except for him murmuring "Priase Lilith!" and bowing his head in prayer when there was nobody else around to hear him. Plus, the coming attractions reel for this Sunday's episode seems to suggest that his conversion is sincere.

My theory as to why normal humans can drive stakes/shards of wood/chopsticks/etc. into a vampire's heart when there should be hard muscle and bone protecting it is that part of a vampire's physical transformation is the softening of that area of the body. At least I've never seen something contradicting that theory.

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